Despite last-minute vote changes and curveballs that included five new amendments – one of which nearly derailed the project – the Cambridge City Council voted 7-1 Monday, April 8, to approve MIT’s proposal to redevelop a 26-acre swath of Kendall Square, adding over 1 million square feet of redevelopment potential.

Erin Baldassari/ebaldassari@wickedlocal.com

Despite last-minute vote changes and curveballs that included five new amendments – one of which nearly derailed the project – the Cambridge City Council voted 7-1 Monday, April 8, to approve MIT’s proposal to redevelop a 26-acre swath of Kendall Square, adding over 1 million square feet of redevelopment potential.

Vice Mayor Denise Simmons voted present — neither for nor against the petition — and Councilor Minka vanBeuzekom voted against. The council unanimously approved MIT’s letter of commitment, which contributes $19.5 million to city coffers, makes commitments for affordable housing, dedicates innovation space for emerging companies, and transfers a vacant parking lot on Cherry Street to the city, along with a series of other sweeteners.

Three councilors proposed five new amendments after 10 p.m. at the April 8 meeting, but spent less than an hour deliberating despite several councilors who said they didn’t understand some of the amendments or asked for clarification. Only two of the five proposed amendments passed.

More than a hundred people packed the Sullivan Chambers to voice strong support and cautionary opposition to the plan. After two and a half hours of public comment, councilors filibustered for nearly two hours until Tim Toomey and Marjorie Decker, who also serve as state representatives, could arrive from a vote on overhauling the state’s transportation system taking place simultaneously at the State House.

As soon as the councilors arrived, Mayor Henrietta Davis informed the council they only had a “brief window” to be at City Hall to vote before returning to the State House and said it would be helpful for councilors to go through the amendments “without too much discussion.”

Councilor David Maher, who chairs the Ordinance Committee that oversees zoning, said the circumstances called for an expedited vote, and further debate would not have changed anyone’s mind.

“I think we are obviously very late into the process here – three years into this dialogue – and people knew how they were going to vote when they came in here tonight,” Maher said. “Although it’s a unique situation, the outcome is exactly the same.”

In an unusual turn of events, one of the amendments – proposed by vanBeuzekom to require MIT buildings to net zero energy efficiency standards by purchasing renewable energy credits – initially passed on a 5-4 vote until Davis reversed her decision 10 minutes after Maher conferred with representatives from MIT and its Investment Management Company (MITIMCO) outside of the chambers.

Maher returned, spoke to each councilor individually on the floor while Councilor Ken Reeves talked about a tour of the University Relations Committee at MIT, and then Davis changed her decision, voting present instead.

“It’s come to my attention that this may be a way to sink this whole entire project,” Davis said. “It was not my intention to cast a vote that did that. It breaks my heart to change my vote, but I think it’s important to see this project through, and I know MIT has the best of intentions on greenhouse gas emissions.”

MIT’s letter of commitment requires LEED Gold energy efficiency standards as a minimum standard for all new commercial and residential development. Maher said requiring MIT to build all of its buildings, including laboratories, to net-zero standards would “have made it nearly impossible to finance.”

“Putting that as a restriction is really difficult, and you’re holding (MIT) to a completely different threshold than anybody else,” Maher said. “So, I think that was very problematic, and I think the Mayor saw that.”

Asked if MIT was not supportive of the amendment, Maher said, “Obviously.”

New amendments

It was too late to call for a special meeting of the City Council before the petition expires on April 15, Maher said. The council would normally meet that day, a Monday, but City Hall is closed for Patriots’ Day, and Maher said he and Davis “hadn’t gone around to ask everybody their availability” for a meeting later in the week.

Councilor Craig Kelley blasted councilors Leland Cheung, vanBuezekom, and Decker for proposing amendments after 10 p.m. on the night of a vote. Representatives from MIT and MITIMCO first presented a redevelopment proposal to the council in the spring of 2010, which eventually led to councilors hiring planning consultant Goody Clancy roughly a year later to engage stakeholders in a comprehensive plan for Kendall and Central squares – colloquially dubbed the K2C2 study. Recommendations from the study were issued in August, and MIT filed the newest iteration of the petition in December.

“We’re talking about amendments, and it’s 10 past 10 on a Monday night,” Kelley said. “We’ve just heard how many years we’ve been talking about this …to start throwing stuff in at this late date is going to make all those people who came here skeptical of the process even more skeptical, and it’s going to be tough for me not to agree with them.”

One of two amendments that passed (on a 5-4 vote) came from Cheung, who asked that the zoning language be changed to further incentivize innovation space for startups and emerging companies by increasing floor-area exemptions for that space from 10 percent to 20 percent. MIT has already committed to setting aside 5 percent of new commercial ground floor area for startups and another 5 percent for “emerging” companies that require spaces “larger than typical innovation space, but less than 5,000 square feet.”

The council voted 5-4 against a petition proposed by Cheung to increase allowable heights from 300 feet to 350 feet, with the additional height going towards only residential use and 25 percent of the additional space reserved for middle-income housing.

An amendment by vanBuezekom to reduce the noise-level threshold from the current, commercial standard in the zoning to “the midpoint of residential and industrial” noise levels, failed on a vote of 5-4. vanBuezekom’s second amendment to require net-zero building standards also failed with Reeves and Davis voting present, and Kelley, Maher, and Toomey voting no.

Decker’s amendment, which passed on a 5-4 vote, moved roughly $10 million from “community benefit” funds as described in recommendations from the K2C2 study to a “general mitigation” fund so the money “wouldn’t be restricted by K2C2 principals that have not been adopted by the City Council.”

Although the Kendall Square Advisory Committee – a committee of 20 stakeholders in the Kendall Square area including residents and business owners – released recommendations from the study in August, the council has not yet formally taken up their recommendations or adopted them as policy.

Town-Tech Divide

Supporters and opponents divided their time equally over the two and half hours of public comment. Business leaders, including the Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki, spoke of the uniqueness of Kendall Square as a “supercluster” for innovation and a driver of economic growth.

Bialecki cautioned that Cambridge and Boston’s dominance as an innovation sector was being usurped by New York City as a center for technology, and the fight to maintain dominance would be “our collective great challenge over the next 10 years.”

“There will be many different opinions and debates about what we need to do to succeed, but I am convinced there is one thing we will certainly need to do, and that is dramatically grow the density, intensity and scale of the innovation activity that is happening here,” Bialecki said. “We cannot afford to stop now. In the Patrick Administration, we are actively planning for continued growth and even accelerated growth of our innovation economy, and we are asking you to do the same.”

Several startup founders decried the increasing pressures on rents in the area and lauded provisions in the petition that would reserve space for nascent and growing companies. A former chair of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC), Steve O’Leary, said density was critical to the region’s success.

“We refer to this as the ‘bump factor’ – those in-person connections happening either intentionally or serendipitously that completely change ideas around innovation,” O’Leary said. “It’s been present in every wave of economic transformation in Massachusetts.”

Still, opponents spoke of a growing divide between the emerging tech sector and residential neighborhoods and called on the council to let the petition expire until further safeguards for affordable housing and economic diversity could be negotiated. Residents lamented rents that have steadily increased over the years since the loss of rent control and the dwindling supply of middle-income housing in the city.

Former Transportation Secretary, Fred Salvucci, warned that the first “gentrifiers” of Cambridge would be driven out by a second wave of gentrification. Resident Lesley Cohen bemoaned what she described as a “town-gown” divide.

“Yes, we’re really proud of the growth that’s gone on in Cambridge … but we’re really afraid that ‘world class’ is starting to mean no working class and no middle-income people,” Cohen said. “What we’re really talking about is how we are going to stabilize development for all of Cambridge and for all people and continue to make it economically diverse.”

Cherry Street resident Lydia Vickers lauded MIT’s gift of the vacant, dilapidated lot on her street to the city, but denounced what she described as a “bribe” for more development.

“I can’t help feeling skuzzy now that I know what I wanted for so long might actually become a reality. That lot is being used to bribe the City Council to vote for a petition that would not only lay the foundation for enormous development in Kendall and Central squares, but it would lay the precedent for more development across the city that I really don’t want,” Vickers said. “I don’t know what would happen to that little parking lot I live next to, but wish I felt better about it.”